A made-in-Canada remedy for the UK Tories?

Coming off a lowly finish in the Eastleigh byelection last week, the U.K. Conservatives have been thrown into fresh existential disarray (likely more profound than that which it suffered during and after the Commons vote on same-sex marriage).

They finished in third place in the byelection, behind the Liberal Democrats and the upstart anti-EU, anti-immigration and anti-gay marriage United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). The result was embarrassing for the Conservatives for a few reasons. First, because the Lib Dems have been polling so poorly nationally of late, with leader Nick Clegg a particular source of disappointment. Second, the Conservatives pushed what The Economistcalled an “UKIPish campaign” in Eastleigh. That might have scuppered its appeal in the constituency, as “by tacking to the right in a deliberate… attempt to contain UKIP’s rise, the Conservatives made it easier for the Lib Dems to ‘differentiate’ themselves from their coalition partners.” So, they came up short.

So now what? Some Conservative MPs are pushing for a new leadership contest, and at the Telegraph, Toby Young and Daniel Hannan have suggested a unite-the-right type of approach (though Young figures that can’t happen while David Cameron is still around). Young’s not sure whether there should be a full union of the Conservatives and UKIP – it could be simply a tactical voting coalition or as complicated as “informal pacts” between UKIP and Conservative riding associations “where such arrangements could be mutually beneficial.”

For Canadian observers, everything about this sounds very familiar, a mirror image of the ongoing domestic debate over whether the New Democrats and Liberals ought to run some kind of similar deal in the next election in order to unseat the Conservatives. Liberal leadership candidate Joyce Murray – like Nathan Cullen did when he ran for leadership of the NDP – has made it a central plank in her platform. It probably won’t happen here, and despite his advocating for it, Young remains skeptical it will happen in the U.K.

His colleague, Hannan, took it a step further, likening the problem to the one the Reform Party and old Progressive Conservatives addressed in the 1990s in Canada to end “a split that gifted the Left vast parliamentary majorities on a minority of the vote for over a decade.”

Hannan summarizes what he sees as the parallels:

“Canada’s Tories, like Britain’s, suffered from being portrayed as a party of privilege. Reform brought very different supporters to the table: not just prairie voters, but blue-collar workers, immigrants and others. Most of these voters followed Reform into the alliance with the Tories, which eventually became one party: today’s Conservative Party of Canada. In consequence, that party has carried on winning. The first leader of the merged party, Stephen Harper, came from Reform. He is now the most successful leader of any G7 country, having steered Canada through the recent crisis with no bailouts and no recession. That mutatis mutandis, is the happy future that might await a Tory-Ukip alliance.”

Hannan draws a pretty rosy picture, and over at the Daily Beast, David Frum explains why that might be. In sum, it’s incorrect.

“That’s not what happened at all. Both Canadian parties changed,” Frum wrote on his Daily Beast blog Monday. “The old-line Conservatives opened up to new ideas and new voters, yes. It also happened that the former Reform party accepted pragmatism and gradualism.”

Should the Conservatives adopt their UKIP cousins? Probably not, says The Economist. Jonathan Freedland at The Guardianagrees. The Eastleigh UKIP result seems to have been partly a protest vote from disaffected citizens, Freedland says. “By seeking to close the gap with [UKIP leader Nigel] Farage, Cameron retoxifies the brand he once strove to decontaminate. Every move he makes rightward shifts him away from the centre ground he sought from the beginning to make his own.” That is, the Eastleigh result could be repeated nationally.

It’s something to consider. As is the case in Canada, elections in the U.K. these days tend to be won on broad, centrist policy platforms. The U.K. Conservatives, under Cameron, did that in 2010. This is also where the comparison to Canada falls apart. Leading the governing party puts Cameron in a very different kind of bargaining position than the one in which the old Canadian PCs found themselves when the Alliance came calling. By the looks of things, Cameron’s taking the pragmatic advice – for now. The Conservatives will remain “true to our principles,” he said. As long as those aren’t subject to change, of course.